The Classical World is a more epic epic than any toga-clad celluloid epic to date... Mr Lane Fox's brilliant book, where soldiers, poets and orators fight for attention in a story that is never cluttered and always stimulating.

witty, ferociously learned, enormously well read

an ambitious and exhilarating volume...The Classical World is so replete with insight and anecdote that I would love to see it in every school library.

we are in the hands of an author who knows that an epic can only be driven by big characters such as Pericles, Demosthenes, Philip, Cicero, Pompey, Caesar and Cleopatra...Here lies the author's mastery, matching a lifelong familiarity with his subject to the basic needs of a newly arrived apprentice

Nothing comes close to Tina Brown's book for its tight grip on the dark human comedy that was Diana's life and death. Brown knows the ritual dances, the shouts and whispers of the tribes of Britain - the Sloanes, the paparazzi, the aristos, and the cocktail lounge lizards - better than anyone who has ever written this story, but she also has a perfect ear for the way ordinary people responded to the doomed Princess. The result is compulsively page-turning.

The Diana Chronicles is a blockbuster: a rollicking, page-turning, fast quipping, gripping romp of a read. It is the work of a seasoned, serious journalist who understands that just because a subject has a populist appeal does not mean that it has to get the dumb treatment

Tina Brown makes Diana as deeply fascinating as the great heroines of literature. She is magnificent at creating atmosphere.

Every previous Dianologist must now take a back seat. Tina Brown's The Diana Chronicles is not a book on Diana. It is the book. It conveys better than anything I have ever read, the basic intelligence of its subject. The truly impressive thing about the book is its wisdom. It is full of good mots. It is a master. Ruthless, relentlessly inquisitive, it made me cheer to the rafters.

Authoritative and well researched, Tina Brown's book should become standard reading material about the People's Princess

Ms. Brown is in an ideal position to sort out fact from factoid. She casts a sophisticated and skeptical eye over the reams of nonsense which have smothered the Diana myth. Her sophisticated approach, a triumph of reporting, makes The Diana Chronicles a candy feast of royal gossip to be consumed preferably at a single sitting. It will bring the summer to a standstill. Every last quip and quote, snip and sneer, joke and jape about this disastrous marriage is recorded with elegance and interpreted with wise understanding.

A fresh portrait of Princess Diana and the impact she had on a generation.

A definitive look.

written with real understanding

A fascinating description of Britain in the cold, hard winter of 1962 and early 1963, when it started to snow on Boxing Day and didn't stop for 10 weeks

Frostquake is wholly remarkable . . . a rare and engrossing read that brought that time straight back to my memory and consciousness

The freezing winter of 1962-63 finally thawed in early March and as if on cue British society and politics became molten and mobile. Those who lived through it will never forget it. Those who didn't, need to know about it. Juliet Nicolson is brilliant at recapturing mood, moment and character. It's as if the inhabitants of that extraordinary time have flung open the door and welcomed her in from the blizzard outside to tell her all. This book is a must

I was absolutely enthralled from first page to last. It's truly remarkable, so well written, and the scope of her research is extraordinary. I particularly admire the way she entwines her own family's experience with what was going on at the time - a very vivid, accurate and perceptive portrayal of the period at all social, political and cultural levels

I loved this beautifully written account of one icy winter during the 1960s in which familiar stories of pop music and politics surprised me thanks to Juliet Nicolson's brilliant research. These events interwoven with Nicolson as an eight year old child and her relationship with her widowed grandfather and her younger brother highlighting how early experiences live on in us forever, make this a deeply moving and original book

The bitter winter of 1962-3 closed down life for Britain just as Covid is doing today. Juliet Nicolson was a child then and is a scintillating storyteller now. There is not an icicle, politician, scandal or song missing from this engrossing re-creation of times so recently passed. Enchanting and wise, it leaves this message for our future: they survived, and so shall we

This is an absolutely mesmerising book. Where I knew of the events concerned I was fascinated by the vivid retelling, and when I didn't I was utterly gripped

Works fizzingly well on all its many different levels . . . the unity between the national crisis and the family story never falters. The sensuous delight Juliet Nicolson takes in the natural world makes the snow both villain and star of Frostquake

In 1962 East Sussex snowdrifts reached 23ft and in London milkmen made deliveries on skis. The experience shaped the Britain of the 1960s, argues Nicolson in this lively social history

Wonderfully comprehensive

Exhilarating

[An] entertaining account

A micro-history of that extraordinarily cold winter, which, she [Nicolson] argues, changed Britain forever

A wonderful book

Juliet Nicolson's Frostquake is a micro-history of that extraordinarily cold winter, which, she argues, changed Britain forever. Nicolson is a warm guide to that freezing time, weaving together memories of her childhood at Sissinghurst, the nascent Chelsea set scene on the Kings Road, global politics and the Profumo affair

[An] enthralling account of the horrendous winter of 1962/3

Free is astonishing. Lea Ypi has a natural gift for storytelling. It brims with life, warmth, and texture, as well as her keen intelligence. A gripping, often hilarious, poignant, psychologically acute masterpiece and the best book I've read so far this year

Lea Ypi's teenage journey through the endtimes of Albanian communism tells a universal story: ours is an age of collapsed illusions for many generations. Written by one of Europe's foremost left-wing thinkers, this is an unmissable book for anyone engaged in the politics of resistance

This extraordinary coming-of-age story is like an Albanian Educated but it is so much more than that. It beautifully brings together the personal and the political to create an unforgettable account of oppression, freedom and what it means to acquire knowledge about the world. Funny, moving but also deadly serious, this book will be read for years to come

A new classic that bursts out of the global silence of Albania to tell us human truths about the politics of the past hundred years. . . It unfolds with revelation after revelation - both familial and national - as if written by a master novelist. As if it were, say, a novella by Tolstoy. That this very serious book is so much fun to read is a compliment to its graceful, witty, honest writer. A literary triumph

Illuminating and subversive, Free asks us to consider what happens to our ideals when they come into contact with imperfect places and people and what can be salvaged from the wreckage of the past

A young girl grows up in a repressive Communist state, where public certainties are happily accepted and private truths are hidden; as that world falls away, she has to make her own sense of life, based on conflicting advice, fragments of information and, above all, her own stubborn curiosity. Thought-provoking, deliciously funny, poignant, sharply observed and beautifully written, this is a childhood memoir like very few others -- a really marvellous book

Free is one of those very rare books that shows how history shapes people's lives and their politics. Lea Ypi is such a brilliant, powerful writer that her story becomes your story

Lea Ypi is a pathbreaking philosopher who is also becoming one of the most important public thinkers of our time. Here she draws on her unique historical experience to shed new light on the questions of freedom that matter to all of us. This extraordinary book is both personally moving and politically revolutionary. If we take its lessons to heart, it can help to set us free

I haven't in many years read a memoir from this part of the world as warmly inviting as this one. Written by an intellectual with story-telling gifts, Free makes life on the ground in Albania vivid and immediate

Lea Ypi has a wonderful gift for showing and not telling. In Free she demonstrates with humour, humanity and a sometimes painful honesty, how political communities without human rights will always end in cruelty. True freedom must be from both oppression and neglect

A funny and fascinating memoir

A rightly acclaimed account of loss of innocence in Albania from a master of subtext . . . Precise, acute, often funny and always accessible

A remarkable story, stunningly told

A vivid portrayal of how it felt to live through the transition from socialism to capitalism, Ypi's book will interest readers wishing to learn more about Albania during this tumultuous historical period, but also anyone interested in questioning the taken-for-granted ideological assumptions that underpin all societies and shape quotidian experiences in often imperceptible ways

A classic, moving coming-of-age story. . . Ypi is a beautiful writer and a serious political thinker, and in just a couple hundred readable pages, she takes turns between being bitingly, if darkly, funny (she skewers Stalinism and the World Bank with equal deadpan) and truly profound

Beguiling. . . the most probing memoir yet produced of the undefined 'transition' period after European communism. More profoundly a primer on how to live when old verities turn to dust. Ypi has written a brilliant personal history of disorientation, of what happens when the guardrails of everyday life suddenly fall away. . . Reading Free today is not so much a flashback to the Cold War as a glimpse of every society's possible pathway, a postcard from the future